i spoke with my nissan guru mate and turns out he's the guy who may have been the original source of d's info about the terrible rod/stroke ratio of the qr25

his estimation is that the qr was originally designed by nissan engineers to be a 2.0, but marketing demanded a torquey 2.5 to please the smiths

so they cobbled it together, much the same way guys put z24 cranks in l20b's and thought there was no replacement for displacement